Saturday, April 30, 2016

Peter Ross, from what I can gather from his profile,—he “deconstructs the psychology and philosophy of the business world, careers and every day life,” whatever that means”—is an “ivory tower intellectual” living in Australia. Nonetheless, he penned an op-ed to explain “the Thing so Many Americans Can’t Grasp About Bernie Sanders.”

The “many Americans,” of course, are Sanders’ opponents. We just don’t understand Sanders, lectures Ross. Let’s see about that.

Ross plugs Bernie Sanders as representing “a point on the political spectrum that is mildly left of centre.” As if that tells you anything substantive. He doesn’t even define political Left and Right, so how are we to know what he means by “center?”

But, okay, few pundits actually define their terms. Be that as it may, what we can decipher is that Ross is an unabashed statist who apparently believes that all good comes from government coercion. He condemns American culture—we are all miserably unhappy, he asserts, without explanation—but forgets to tell you that the world's welfare states are on the verge of collapse, or that America’s Poor Are Richer Than Europe’s Middle Class, or that America’s allegedly oversized military budget has been the shieldprotecting Western Civilization from barbarians for the last 100 years, including Australia from the Japanese Empire in World War II and Red Chinese aggression after that and Western Europe from fascist and Soviet aggression on the other side of the globe, allowing our allies to get away with spending less on defense than they should.

But that and other stuff aside, Ross’s whole article is easily refuted. I won’t refute it all in this post, although I have addressed most of his claims elsewhere. For now, let’s address just a couple of his points:

[M]ore government programs means more jobs for people. Considering government jobs usually come with pretty decent conditions, that’s undoubtedly a good thing.

[B]ut are these value-adding jobs? The easiest thing in the world to do is make out-of-context assertions. But economic analysis 101 demands much more. Ignoring Frédéric Bastiat’s age-old observation about the difference between a bad economist and a good one—“The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen”—Ross ignores what is not seen; he ignores consequences, while focussing only on the immediately perceivable. In classic Leftist style, Ross ignores the many more private sector jobs that are destroyed or don’t come into existence because of resources sucked by force out of the private economy to support the government jobs. Sure, the government can create plenty of “jobs”—it can pay people to dig and refill holes all day—because all it has to do is confiscate taxpayers money at gunpoint to pay for it. Private businesses, the real job creators, have to rely on voluntary consent of consumers to survive. We are all poorer for government programs because the people who fill the related government jobs are not productive, just redistributing what others have produced—i.e., they’re just digging and refilling holes. The destructive economics of government “safety net” programs—which are only made possible by taxing private enterprise in a market economy—is not the worst of it, though. They are immoral because based on armed aggression by government officials that deny people the right to spend their own money on their own lives as they judge best. The last thing that Ross, Sanders, or their supporters can claim is concern for the well-being of their fellow man.

That’s just one point. The article is full of fallacies. Everything Ross says can be refuted by logic, facts, context, and morality.

But let’s move on to fundamentals. Here, Ross gets to the crux of the matter:

Here’s the big thing about Bernie that makes so much sense to the rest of the world, but not to a lot of you. Our earliest ancestors formed tribes so we could hunt more efficiently and protect one another. We moved on to villages, then cities and finally nations for mutual benefit. We can do more together than alone, and when we band together we can put safety nets in place so if people are unlucky and get struck down, we can all help them back up. That way no one has to live in fear of losing out in the lottery of life. That’s what social democracy is, and those of us who live in them recognize that what we have is pretty damn great.

This paragraph strips away the pretense, and gets to the gruesome heart of the matter. Yes, socialism, however it manifests—full or partial, democratic or coup-d'etat—is a regression to primitive tribalism. America is the first country to explicitly reject, in its Founding philosophy, the tribal premise, establishing instead a country based on the freedom and sovereignty of the individual to rise as far as his ability, ambition, and personal circumstances will carry him—and to keep the product of his own labor as a matter of inalienable right. This feature powered America, in barely a century, from a mere colony to the most powerful economic and military power the world had ever seen. Tribal reactionaries, led by ivory tower intellectuals, have been fighting back against American individualism and self-responsibility ever since. Bernie Sanders is no progressive. He is one of the reactionaries.

The march of civilization is the transition from tribalism (these days usually referred to as collectivism) toward individualism. Collectivism holds that the group is the focus of moral concern. Under collectivism, the individual is subordinate to the group and can be sacrificed at any time and in any way, if the group deems such sacrifice to be to its good (the “public good,” the “good of society,” the “national interest,” the “common good,” "the people," etc.). Individualism holds that the focus of moral concern is the individual. Under individualism, individuals have inalienable rights to his life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal goals, values, and happiness, so long as the individual respects the same rights of others, and pursues his goals through his own effort and in voluntary, mutually consensual trade, association, and cooperation with others. No other humans, including government officials, whether acting alone or as a group (e.g., street gang or voting majority) may interfere in the individual’s pursuits. Collectivism (not to be confused with cooperation) fails because a group or collective is not an entity but an abstraction, so the practice of collectivism is always omnipotent government. Individualism succeeds because the individual is an actual entity, the only human entity that exists—the only entity that thinks, feels, values, judges, chooses, and acts. Collectivism leads to socialism, which is based on armed aggression. Individualism leads to capitalism, which is based on peaceful co-existence. Any subordination of the individual to the collective is barbaric and inhumane, as any ideology that repudiates the moral value of individual human beings must.

For example, as to the question of doing things “together,” the issue Ross evades is what he actually means by “together.” When Ross speaks of “do more together” or “band together,” he speaks of the togetherness of a chain gang built on aggressive physical force under a tribal central planner. Private individuals are capable of and do work together in myriad ways, without government coercion. But leaving people free to voluntarily act together, or not, is not Ross’s concern. The individual, in Ross’s collectivist world, is of no moral consideration—and this lack of consideration comes across loud and clear in his whole article. Ross blurs the moral difference between forced collectivization and voluntary cooperation, which is a black and white as you can get. If we accept Ross’s premise that “doing things together” means government forcing us to do things together, then there’s no area of our lives that is safe from collective aggression. This moral blurring is typical of people who want to enslave you to the tribe.

The only just and moral way of acting together is voluntary cooperation to mutual advantage, such as private business concerns or unions, clubs, private schools, charitable organizations (private “safety net”), sports teams, and the like. In an individualist—i.e., free—society, every individual is free NOT to participate. Try NOT participating in one of Sanders’s government programs—you’ll be assaulted by armed government agents, arrested, and thrown into a cage. But the people who do not want to participate in and pay for the government programs are not the concern of Ross, or of Sanders: Dissenters are, after all, individuals, and individuals are granted no moral consideration in the collectivist worldview. Collectivism is a slave culture—probably worse that ancient tribalism. Individualism is a free, progressive market culture.

Finally, in his conclusion, Ross writes:

And all of this ignores the massive, massive elephant in the room: that your corporations, banks and politicians have no qualms about being socialist when it suits them. They’ll happily put their hands out for subsidies that they don’t need to make billions more that won’t be taxed—or when they tank your economy and the rest of the world’s economy they’ll complain that they’re too big to fail before taking all your hard earned money.

True: The crony mixed economy, or mixture of socialism and capitalism, of controls and freedom, is certainly what we have now—and is precisely what Sanders wants to expand upon! More government taxing, spending, and government control of our lives only increases the incentive for people to want to influence the government officials doing the taxing, spending, and controlling; which, in turn, means more favor-seeking economic factions, and fewer free market economic factions. The housing boom-and-bust, and related 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, is precisely what you get from the Sanders economy. Sanders wants to fatten up, not slim down, this “massive elephant in the room.” We need the separation of economics and state—laissez-faire capitalism—not more political corruption of the economy, which is Sanders’ immediate goal.

I say immediate goal, because Sanders’ long-term goal is anything but the “tweaking” of the status quo. It’s true that Sanders advocates more of the same of what we have now—a move further Left, but not a full socialist in the sense of government ownership of the means of production. But his ultimate goal is totalitarian socialism—not communism, but fascism, which is backdoor socialism. He’ll move us toward that goal by virtue of whatever socialist steps he can get away with. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, a convergence of two totalitarian systems. The problem with Sanders is not as much his immediate policies, economically bad and ethically immoral as they are, but their direction and intention—to pave the way for continued regression toward his ultimate goal, much as Obama's goal was to pave the way for a Sanders, and Johnson’s goal was to pave the way for Obama, and FDR’s goal was to pave the way for Johnson, and Wilson’s goal was to pave the way for FDR. And all along the way, they blame private enterprise capitalism for the problems their government policies cause.

I consider Sanders to be the most evil and dangerous major politician in America, for reasons I stated here. Oh yes, Mr. Ross, we liberty-loving Americans understand Bernie Sanders quite well.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

I have written often about the “Jihad on Pipelines” being waged against oil and natural gas pipelines across the country, including in my Federal Energy Regulatory Commission post in support of the proposed PennEast Natural Gas pipeline through my home Hunterdon County, New Jersey. To the best of my knowledge, the term “jihad on pipelines” was coined by New Jersey Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine. But the jihad is much wider than pipelines.

Bill McKibben, one of the leading enemies of reliable fossil fuel energy, penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times showing that the jihad on pipelines is part of a broader environmentalist War on Fossil Fuel Infrastructure. In How to drive a stake through the heart of zombie fossil fuel, McKibben writes that the key to shutting down the fossil fuel industry is to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure from being built. We’re talking not just pipelines, but any and all major fossil fuel projects:

Even as global warming makes it clear that coal, natural gas and oil are yesterday's energy, two centuries of fossil fuel development means new projects keep emerging in zombie-like fashion.

In fact, the climactic fight at the end of the fossil fuel era is underway. In statehouse hearing rooms and far off farmers' fields, local activists are making desperate stands to stop new fossil fuel projects, while the energy companies are making equally desperate attempts to build while they still can. The outcome of these thousands of fights, as much or more than the paper promises made at the U.N. climate conference in Paris in December, will determine whether we emerge from this century with a habitable planet. They are the battle for the future.

It sure is. New fossil fuel projects keep emerging because fossil fuels continue by far to be the best energy technology available. Success by these anti-reliable energy jihadists will result not in immediate hardship but in progressive deterioration in our ability to live as human beings—our economic strength and standard of living. McKibben is crystal clear on the purpose of the Jihad on Fossil Fuel Energy Infrastructure:

Here's the basic math: If you build a pipeline in 2016, the investment will be amortized for 40 years or more. It is designed to last — to carry coal slurry or gas or oil — well into the second half of the 21st century. It is, in other words, designed to keep us extracting carbon, the very thing scientists insist we simply can't keep doing and survive.

The same “basic math” goes for propane export terminal projects or fracking or underground gas storage facilities or coal export terminals and so on, all mentioned in the article.

Yes, the energy abundance that gives us our prosperity today is there because of investments made years and decades ago. Energy companies plan long term. Killing that long-term planning will lead to increasingly intense energy poverty leading to steadily increasing suffering and death of billions of human beings—and all allegedly for an imperceptibly slightly cooler world, in theory!

Keep in mind that McKibben offers no alternative to fossil fuels. If there were a better alternative, they wouldn’t have to attack fossil fuels politically—i.e., by stopping energy investment by force. They could win in honest competition, winning away fossil fuel industry customers by offering a superior non-carbon alternative like nuclear power, some technological breakthrough form of wind or solar, or some other source that proves more a superior form of scalable energy that consumers would willingly buy. Be he doesn't because he can’t. “[F]or now,” he readily acknowledges, “there's really no other way to kill a zombie.”

Worse, McKibben knows this full well, and he doesn’t care. McKibben calls fossils fuels “yesterday’s energy.” But then what is tomorrow’s? “If you can't do fossil fuel energy,” McKibben flippantly asserts, “you have to do something else — sun, wind, conservation.” Sound familiar?—“Oh, you’ll do something!” This is classic Leftism: Pass economy-crippling laws and regulations, and then hope for somebody else to come along to pick up the pieces.

Clearing, McKibben’s concern is not for human well-being. McKibben’s moral concern is with keeping the climate and the Earthly environment as free of human industrial improvement as possible. This is key: McKibben doesn’t give a damn about your well-being, or mine, or our children’s, or anyone’s. To him, a “habitable planet” is a planet suited only for the lives of cave men before the harnessing of carbon dioxide-emitting fire. McKibben is the leader of the real zombies; those primitives who want to roll back industrial prosperity.

Yes, we are in a battle for the future. People who values their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren had better wake up to the sinister activities of our future’s fossil fuel enemies.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

During his run for the GOP presidential nomination, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie attacked President Obama’s dictatorial “Clean Power” regulations, which is basically an attempt—so far successful—to bankrupt the U.S. coal industry.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the multinational auditor, recently released its annual survey of 1,322 CEOs from 77 countries. At the top of the list of fears for these flinty men of commerce, at 78 percent, was "over-regulation." Climate change did not even crack the top 20.

These are doubtlessly smart people. But this endemic ignorance – or is it institutional stupidity? – is a threat to the species, and the resistance to change by even the most accomplished men is why President Obama had to roll out his Clean Power Plan Monday.

After praising Obama’s regulatory attack on coal as “the most significant climate initiative this country has ever undertaken,” the Star-Ledger goes on:

So right on cue, Gov. Christie said all the wrong things about the Clean Power initiative.

It has become a tedious litany: Reducing carbon will kill jobs, they say. It will hurt business. It will drive up energy prices. Enforcing regulations like this is unconstitutional.

Right on cue, the Star-Ledger echoes the climate change catastrophists’ disregard of the benefits of fossil fuels, the threat to human well-being of the assault on fossils, and its classic “progressive” disdain for the rule of rights-protecting law.

Though the immediate ire of the Star-Ledger was directed at coal, the same arguments used to attack coal energy can be directed at natural gas and oil.

Reasonable people need constant rejoinders to the catastrophists’ false narrative, so I left these comments, edited for clarity:

This kind of hyper-hyperbole is indicative of the climate-mongers’ panic. Is it any wonder reasonable people have a hard time taking it seriously? It’s not just big business CEOs who place climate change low on their list of concerns. Average voters also do, as Gallup and many other polls regularly show. As Anthony Watts reports for the climate change website WUWT,

The inescapable conclusion [from the Gallup poll], in my opinion, is that there has been no climate “breakthrough”, and there is unlikely to be a significant rise in support for climate alarmist policies in the foreseeable future. Climate scare stories are only reaching people who are already worried about climate change.

Both average voters and CEOs have good reason not to panic on climate change: Far from the catastrophe that environmentalists have been predicting for decades, life around the globe keeps getting better as fossil fuel energy production increases.

On 8/2/15, the Star-Ledger ran a Bloomberg article on global prosperity. Since 2001, the percentage of the world’s population living in poverty dropped by half, from 29% to 15%. Every category of economic well being—low, middle, upper middle, and high income—gained. During this period, fossil fuel-driven energy production soared as carbon emissions from emerging “Third World” economies surpassed America’s. At the same time, one climate catastrophe prediction after another bit the dust.

Going back further, climate-related deaths have dropped 98% over the past hundred years—the very era of global warming. Global warming notwithstanding, we are safer than ever from extreme weather and other climate-related dangers.

Going back still further—to the dawn of the industrial revolution, especially since the rise of fossil fuels—our environment has gotten cleaner as people shifted from open wood and dung-burning fires for heat and cooking and animal transportation to centralized, mostly fossil fuel-driven power supplies. Lives have gotten longer, more comfortable, healthier, better fed, and more flourishing generally. Whereas humans for millennia had been at the mercy of climate dangers, climate dangers in the modern era are ever-less of a threat.

Everywhere around the world, fossil fuels-driven economic progress has been making people’s lives better, right up to the current day. These “ignorant” and “stupid” global CEOs, who run giant companies that cater to the needs and wants of the increasingly prosperous world population, are a much better measure of the truth than the climate catastrophists. Regulations that hamper productiveness—including War on Fossil Fuels regulations—are the real threat to human well-being. Obama’s initiative is cruel, as is the root dogma that CO2—which is vital to life on Earth and harmless to humans—is a pollutant.

Climate catastrophe exists only in the computer models that churn out perpetually failed predictions of catastrophe. Despite the fact that, today, 87% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, there is no existential proof of climate catastrophe. The final proof of the failure of the climate catastrophists’ to prove their case—and why climate change is increasingly less of a primary concern of most people, regardless of out-of-context polls—is that the peddlers of climate catastrophe dogma refuse to openly debate the “skeptics” and their counter-arguments. Instead, all you get are smears and intimidation and claims of “settled science.” The climate catastrophists are intellectual cowards, and ad hominem, the siren song of the intellectual coward—along with increasingly shrill (and spectacularly wrong) catastrophe predictions—are their only weapons.

These last two, among others, are the reasons I don’t buy climate catastrophe. One of my top concerns is the climate catastrophists’ war on today’s most reliable, economical, and best energy technology—fossil fuels. My test of who to vote for will include a candidate’s willingness to openly reject the climate catastrophists and their potentially catastrophic (for humans) War on Fossil Fuels agenda.

The problem is not racial discrimination as such. Zoning boards give bigots and other NIMBY interests the power to “segregate” neighborhoods and towns by force. Without such legal powers, builders would be able to build housing based on demand, wherever that demand my surface. The builders would be free to respond to the rational value choices of housing consumers. The racial makeup of towns might still occasionally not meet some bureaucrat's idea of “diversity.” But, given that the distribution of housing would be based on the free market, whatever housing patterns developed would be just and moral because it would be based on the voluntary choices and value judgements of free individuals contracting voluntarily with each other, without any coercive interference from government-empowered social engineers, local, state, or federal.

This data point — the share of poor people living in deeply poor places — gets at an important element of poverty that's obscured by citywide poverty rates. "The concentration of poverty is really about the spatial organization of poverty," Jargowsky writes. It captures how we've designed communities to pen poverty in, restricting many poor African Americans in particular to a limited number of neighborhoods.

"The term ‘concentration’ does in some way suggest that poor people are moving from all over the place into these neighborhoods, and they become teeming slums like at the turn of the century," Jargowsky says. "But it’s actually the opposite: People are moving out to the older suburbs, and people in the older suburbs are moving to the newer suburbs."

Friday, April 22, 2016

One such uncontested (except by Rand) absurdity was inaugurated on April 22, 1970…the first Earth Day. The inability or unwillingness of Americans to understand and appreciate the actual meaning behind that concept has allowed Earth Day to evolve into a powerful symbol of an ideology that is anti-human life.

Ayn Rand coined the term “anti-industrial revolution” to describe the “ecology” movement of the 1960s and 1970s. That movement was the precursor to the modern environmentalist movement.

The basic premise of Environmentalism is that “nature” in its raw state—which means unaltered by human intervention—has intrinsic value. But the concept "value" cannot be divorced from the concept valuer. Nothing can have intrinsic value ... i.e., value in and of itself. But that is exactly how environmentalism sees nature. The consequences to human freedom and well-being by the acceptance of that doctrine are horrendous. Mark Levine puts it thus:

If nature has "intrinsic value" then nature exists for its own sake. Consequently, man is not to be preferred over any aspect of his natural surroundings. He is no better than any other organism and much worse because of his destructive existence. Is not man, therefore, expendable? And if he is, is not the suppression of his liberty, the confiscation of his property, and the blunting of his progress at all times warranted where the purpose is to save the planet - or any part of it - from man himself? After all, it would seem that there can be no end to man's offenses against nature if he is not checked at every turn. (Liberty and Tyranny, pages 121-122)

Think of what it means if nature has intrinsic value. It means that whatever nature "does"—raw nature—is valuable and not to be altered. A volcano erupting and destroying Mount St. Helens, taking with it millions of trees and wild animals, is raw nature, and thus good. Man clearing a forest and “destroying” an ecosystem to build a housing development is not "natural," and thus bad. Animals devouring one another to survive is raw nature. Man using animals for the purpose of testing (human) life-saving medicines is not. Crop-destroying insects or plant diseases is raw nature. Insecticides and bio-engineered pest- and disease-resistant crops is not. A black primordial goo lying underground is raw nature. Gasoline and heating oil is not.

The common denominator of that which is not “raw” nature is that it represents the application of human intelligence to the advance of man’s well-being and survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. Every living species, from the lowest bacteria to the most advanced mammals, must act according to its nature to sustain its life. In other words, every living species is provided by nature with some means of survival, which it must rely on and exercise.

There is one crucial fact of nature that sets man apart from every other living species. Every other species must essentially adapt itself to its natural environmental background. It has no choice in the matter, since it basically has no way of altering that environment. It is thus equipped with the basic means of survival determined by its nature to survive in that manner. Any species that lacks or loses the means to adapt perishes. Man, however, is not equipped to adapt to raw nature. He must, if he is to survive and thrive, adapt his environmental background to his own needs ... by building homes, inventing medical treatments, developing advanced agriculture, producing fuel for transportation and heating ... all produced from exploiting the materials found in raw nature.

Environmentalism’s elevating of nature to the absurd and logically indefensible status of having intrinsic value is a direct assault on, and denial of, man’s method of survival; his need to transform raw nature as dictated by his very nature. That man is himself a product of nature does not daunt the environmentalist mindset. They champion nature, except the one creation of nature that sets man apart. Since man’s primary, basic means of achieving this is his rational mind, the anti-science of environmentalism is thus anti-mind, which means anti-man.

Environmentalism should not be confused with the idea of developing cleaner methods of producing and consuming that which we need to survive and thrive. That is not what the leaders of the environmental movement have in mind. It is human production and technology that is the enemy. Following are some quotes from some of those leaders:

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet ... Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

This last is the ideal that drives environmentalism…the return of mankind to a pre-industrial age when man lived “in harmony” with nature. A time when nature was worshipped, rather than exploited for human gain. Rather than a warm winter home, they long for an existence of savages cowering in fear of natural forces. The name itself, “Environmentalism”, captures the very essence of its meaning, just as Communism or Nazism captures the essence of those systems. In fact, statists of every stripe have latched on to the environmental movement to further their anti-capitalist agendas.

But make no mistake. The agenda of the environmentalists is to thwart, roll back, and destroy the life-giving technology and industrialization of the modern age. This is not to say that I believe that they will succeed. Most people don’t equate environmentalism with an anti-man’s-life agenda. There is a real danger, though, that they will succeed at advancing a statist agenda under cover of environmentalism, leading to a deteriorating economy, rising impoverishment, and possible dictatorship. I submit in evidence the two news items cited in my 2010 Earth Day post.

By celebrating “Earth Day”, we should be aware of the enemies of man that we are helping to bring to power in America and around the world.

Rather than celebrate raw nature, as embodied in “Earth Day”, we should instead look around at all of the life-giving benefits we enjoy as a result of industrialization.

Earth Day is the “holiday” of the anti-industrial revolution. It is the "holiday" of those whose standard of moral value is unimpacted nature. But since man can only survive and thrive by impacting and transforming raw nature into a humanized environment, the Earth Day movement stands in opposition to human well-being.Instead, we should embrace human life as the standard of moral value, and celebrate the holiday of the Industrial Revolution, Exploit The Earth Day!

About Me

Greetings and welcome to my blog. My name is Michael A. (Mike) LaFerrara. I sometimes use the pen or "screen" name "Mike Zemack" or "Zemack" in online activism, such as posted comments on articles. “Zemack” stands for the first letters of the names of my six grandchildren (I now have seven, so I've also used "Zemack+1"). I was born in 1949 in New Jersey, U.S.A., where I retired from a career in the plumbing, building controls, and construction industries, and still reside with my wife of 44 years. The purpose of my blog is the discussion of a wide range of topics relating to human events from the perspective of Objectivism, the philosophy of reason, rational self-interest, and capitalism originated by Ayn Rand.

As Rand observed: “The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher.” I am certainly not the philosopher. But neither am I a field agent, or general. I am a foot soldier in that Objectivist army that fights for an individualist society in which every person can live in dignified sovereignty, by his own reasoned judgment, for his own sake, in that state of peaceful coexistence with his fellow man that only capitalist political and economic freedom can provide. While I am a fully committed Objectivist, my opinions are based on my own understanding of Objectivism, and should not be taken as definitive “Objectivist positions.” For the full story of my journey toward Objectivism, see my Introduction.

One final introductory note: I strongly recommend Philosophy, Who Needs it, which highlights the inescapable importance of philosophy in every individual's life. I can be reached at mal.atlas@comcast.net. Thanks, Mike LaFerrara.

Recommended Essays/Videos

Quotes I Like

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.—Francisco d'Anconia

I love getting older...I get to grow up and learn things. Madalyn, 5 years old, Montesorri student, and my grand-daughter

The best thing one can do for the poor is to not become one of them. Author Unknown

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Francis Bacon

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Ronald Reagan

Thinking is hard work. If it weren't, more people would do it. Henry Ford

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. Ayn Rand